I donate about $5/month to a bunch of nonprofits that I benefit from.

• Debian project
• openbsd project
• wikimedia foundation
• EFF
• Internet Archive

My career wouldn’t exist without these folks, so it’s the least I can do.

Terry Fox, Red Green, Bob & Doug, an angry goose, literally anybody other than that guy.

I choose not to think about it or include it in my mental threat model, the same way I choose to not worry about thermonuclear warheads.

If there’s some exploitable backdoor and Intel gets owned, we’re all boned and there’s nothing we can really do about it. I don’t have anti-ballistic-missile systems, and I also don’t have the capability to make an entire hardware/firmware/os from scratch.

So instead focus on the things you can control and are more likely to happen. Don’t plan for doomsday, plan for every day.

It’s not perfect, but the new (2019+) mazda system is very nice. It’s all controlled by buttons and dials, zero requirement to ever touch a screen. It all feels quite thoughtfully done, especially when you compare it to fords or teslas with a big dumb laggy iPad stuck to the dash.

Local options are always better. The Mexican joint sells you a massive breakfast burrito for $6. Nepalese takeout will feed you for days for $16. Hot dog truck will fill you up with delicious processed meat for $4.

Subway? Subpar lunch made out of cardboard and ground up yoga mats for almost $20.

GOAT vehicle. It’s purely functional in pristine egg form. Bulletproof drivetrain. Comfy as hell, even by today’s standards. If one ever comes up on autotrader in good condition I’m buying one.

The problem is that this also applies within a radius around a “port of entry”. So everybody that lives within about 100 miles of the coast, an airport, or a rail line that crosses a border — which is probably about 80+% of any country.

Agree. Ford’s auto braking and lane keeping in insane and dangerous. It constantly feels like somebody neurotic is reaching over from the passenger seat to grab the wheel. And sometimes it will look at a pothole or puddle and decide to stomp on the brakes. Happened only twice in about 1500km/four days, but that’s still twice too many. Car “automation” tech is still deep in its infancy.

So instead of clipping a wire you plug in a Bluetooth OBD interface and flip a bit in the car’s memory that the engineers conveniently forgot to remove which disables the beeps…

Right, but we have ways to require all automakers to build safe vehicles, commonly known as “safety regulations” that apply to both foreign and domestic companies. The same minimum requirements apply to a Toyota built in Woodstock or a VinFast built in Vietnam. That has nothing to do with tariffs, which are just a tax on consumers on foreign imports. This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business.

Do you people not put milk in your crude oil? I find it suits the subtle bitterness of Alberta tar to give it a wonderful but subtle aftertaste.

Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”

I wish I was the right kind of creative, greedy, and dull to come up with this kind of crap. I could scam so many bald billionaires.

Not sure I’d want to take risk management advice from the mortgage-backed securities ghouls who crashed the economy 15 years ago, but okay I guess.

When you fly on Air Canada there’s a unmutable ad for the Alberta oil sands right after the safety announcement before takeoff. It’s surreal enough, but it’ll be so much worse when they start doing this kind of shit too.

Not surprised that the guy who idolized Trump turned out to also be a nonce. As somebody who used to live in Aurora ON, fuck this guy.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

Real estate about to go brrrrrrr. The largely landlord-represented government again looks for its own interests first.

Anecdotal… we drove through rural Ohio a few weeks ago. In several hours of travel we only saw ONE trump sign. The same place in 2016 or 2020 would have been full of them. Regardless of the impact of this, the enthusiasm is dead. There might be “maga guys” on Twitter but they’re largely disengaged in real life.

If they did this to me I would immediately drag my locked up cart to the customer service desk and return everything. Hard no. Not buying my groceries from a place that aspires to be a prison.